William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was born in Sligo, the elder son of J. B.
and brother of Jack Yeats. He was educated at Godolphin School Hammersmith,
London, The High School, Dublin, and the Dublin School of Art. He had intended
to become a painter like his father and brother, and was influenced by the
Pre-Raphaelite School, but in his twenties gave up painting to become a
full-time writer.

Living initially in London, Yeats returned to Dublin and, with Lady Augusta Gregory and the dramatist Edward Martyn, founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. This became the Irish National Theatre Society, of which Yeats was made president in 1903, and moved into the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904. His plays include The Countess Cathleen (1892), Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902), On Baile's Strand (1904), and Deidre (1907).

Yeats's early poetry, included in collections such as The Wanderings of
Oisin and Other Poems (1889), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), and
The Wind Among the Reeds (1894), was formed from his knowledge of Irish
folklore and folktales, and his interest in mysticism and the occult. Lady
Gregory, herself a collector and translator of Irish legends and stories,
encouraged Yeats, allowed him to stay at her home, Coole Park, and was an
important patron to him.

Yeats's earlier Cuchulain poems and plays both appropriate and reinforce the
symbol of indomitable Irish manhood evoked by the warrior of the Ulster Cycle,
Cuchulain, whose stories he found in Standish O'Grady's History of
Ireland (1878–80). If Ireland is figured as a woman, whether Cathleen ní
Houlihan, or an archetypal beautiful
maiden, mother, or hag, then Cuchulain
>>note 1
is the hero who rescues her, or dies for her. He was to
repudiate the naiveté of his nationalistic "dreaming" in later works.

Irish history and the recent history of Irish nationalism, together with his
adoration of the nationalist Maud Gonne
>>note 2
formed the
major strands of his second phase of writing, and his style became less lilting
and incantatory in In the Seven Woods (1903), The Green Helmet and
Other Poems (1910), Poems: Written in Disappointment (1913), and
Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914). Having realized that Maud
Gonne would never accept him, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917. An
experiment with automatic writing on their honeymoon eventually produced the
system of mystical symbols elaborated in A Vision (1925), which
articulate many of the poems in collections such as Michael Robartes and the
Dancer (1921), Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922), The Cat and the
Moon and Certain Poems (1924), The Tower (1928), and The Winding
Stair (1929). From 1922 to 1928, Yeats was a Senator of the Irish Free
State, and a number of poems from this period depict him as having both poetic
and public responsibilities. In 1923 he received the Nobel Prize for
Literature.

Many poems of the 1920s and 1930s are economical and even austere in
diction, and sharply imagistic; the dreamy cadences of the earlier work had
given way to colloquial and unexpected rhythms, though Yeats could still
produce beauty of unsurpassed lyricism. His later collections include Words
forMusic Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), A Full Moon in
March (1935), New Poems (1938), and Last Poems and Two Plays
(1939). He died in France in 1939 and in 1948 his body was returned to Sligo,
in the northwest of Ireland, and buried in Drumcliffe churchyard under a stone
that bears the epitaph
>>note 3
Yeats wrote for himself, which is part of his poem, "Under Ben Bulben."

As well as the most significant poet of the century, dramatist,
and writer on the occult, Yeats was also known as a major critic and
essayist.